A feed, then, was a mixture of personal posts and pitches to look at other things. It was an endless stream of captions contextualizing a Great Big Outside. But each year the feeds got richer. The captions expanded into previews. The previews expanded into full photos, videos and posts. The remaining links underneath came to resemble vestigial metadata. This was easy to notice from the outside, from the perspective of, say, a publisher, for whom change was reflected in referrals and traffic. For users, the change happened gradually and subtly, over the course of a million consecutive pulls to refresh.

Understood from perspective of the web, the last five years have represented a sort of tragedy of the commons. The platforms grew big and strong. Websites and publishers catered to the needs of those platforms, vague worries about control and identity set aside for the necessary pursuit of audience in an unpredictable environment. Nobody did anything wrong, exactly, and it’s not clear what they should have done differently. Some publications that functioned well under the referral regime will struggle under platforms. Others might succeed, more might materialize out of the Venture Ether. Yet others will chase new things, and many more will just continue to try everything.